I heard some people talking about Michael Vick recently and comparing his exploitation of dogs to hunting. I won’t go into my thoughts on that subject, but it sparked a memory from my childhood. That is the way it comes back to me, in flashes.  For example I smell marijuana and suddenly I remember Christmas morning 1974.

My grandfather was an avid hunter.  He would pack up his guns and travel the world to find helpless creatures in need of a bullet to the head.  As if it shooting them wasn’t bad enough, he would take their dead bodies to a taxidermist, have them stuffed and then bring the life size beasts home and display them in his basement. 

My grandparent's home was set up much like mine is today.  It looks like a ranch from above, but upon closer inspection you realize there is an entire downstairs.  A walk-out basement, though for some reason JJJ aka: Depends on my mood.
What I love:He looks good in a cowboy hat or a business suit and wears them both daily. But not together, that would be creepy.
Hobbies: Building furniture, remodeling homes, playing sports with our kids, laughing with me. Seriously. hates it when I say basement (perhaps it brings flashbacks of being on his knees with his hands over the back of his kneck during all those tornadoe drills when he was young) whatever the reason, he INSISTS I call it a downstairs.

Our DOWNSTAIRS is all kids all the time. It has three filthy bedrooms, two bathrooms with clothes and towels all over the floor and toothpaste EVERYWHERE and a large playroom with a television and Xbox.  We don’t see our kids for days at a time.  Okay, that’s not fair, they do come up for food.

At my grandmother’s house, the DOWNSTAIRS contained two bedrooms and a bathroom to the right of the stairs that were never used and were always dark and filled with cobwebs.

The main room had a television and a lazy boy chair for my grandfather and he spent a lot of his time at home down there watching sports on television.  There was also a BIG creepy storage room that was my grandfather’s workshop and a pool table and bar to the far left of the stairs. 

Every place you looked there was some GOD AWFUL reminder that my grandfather hunted. An elk head hanging above the fireplace, a stuffed mountain goat in the corner, a GIANT stuffed grizzly bear in another corner with his paw out ready to strike you, stuffed full size elks, bear rugs on the floor and even some insanely large fish that my grandmother caught hung over the bar.

DID I MENTION THE GUN CABINET?

Here is where I begin to get to the point of all of this, which by the way, has absolutely NOTHING to do with Michael Vick.

My grandfather used to make all eight of us grandkids “kiddie cocktails”, otherwise known as Shirley Temples.  Every time there was a family gathering, all the kids would get excited and start jumping up and down, “Can we have kiddie cocktails, can we have kiddie cocktails?”  I wanted to bitch slap the crap out of each and everyone of them.

PLEASE GOD NO KIDDIE COCKTAILS.  It wasn’t because I didn’t love them, I did.  I loved the beautiful color, the sweet flavor of the grenadine and my grandfather always put extra cherries.

What I didn’t love, is that for some screwed up reason, they left all the kiddie cocktail fixins (that’s how we said it, it’s not a misspelling) in the BASEMENT. You know in a horror flick where you hear boom, boom, boom and the camera gets closer to the object with each boom? That's how I remember the BASEMENT.  Boom, boom, boom.

This is the problem. I was the oldest of the grandkids and guess whose mother freakin’ job it was to go down the dark ass stairs into that dark ass BASEMENT (boom, boom, boom) and get the cherries and grenadine?  THATS RIGHT. MINE.

So while all the kids bounced around with excitement, I was trying to keep down my cheese ball covered in pecans appetizer as I prepared for the inevitable march (actually it was a full sprint that might give Usain Bolt a run for his money) down into the depths of death and darkness.

Each time, I would go through the same routine.  I'd stand at the top of the stairs and hold onto the door handle.  I took several deep breaths, visualized where each and every light switch was,  then I flung open the door, hit the switch at the top of the stairs, ran as fast as my skinny ass chicken legs would carry me down to the bottom, hit the next switch, ran over to the mountain goat while trying desperately not to look at it, reached behind him and flipped the switch.  I jumped over the bear rug on the floor, rounded the pool table, tried not to jab myself on the elk horns,  flipped the switch at the bar, flung open the door to the fridge, grabbed the grenadine and cherries, and then did the same thing on the way back up.

Yesterday as I was thinking back on that memory, something occurred to me.  THOSE JACKASSES DID IT ON PURPOSE.

I can just see my aunt saying, “Mom, did you remember to put the cherries and grenadine downstairs before we got here?” 

“Oh yes,” my grandmother would reply with a giggle. 

“I’ve got five dollars that says she comes in two seconds under her last time,” my grandfather would say and then the bidding would begin. 

My mom would wait until the first little kid started jumping up and down asking for a damn kiddie cocktail and then she would come and get me out of the closet where I was hiding.  They would pretend to continue what they were doing as if everything was normal and as soon as I got to the top of the stairs, someone would hit the stop watch.  There was silence as they waited with baited breath to see who was going to win all the dough at my expense. 

As I hit the top landing, hair all stuck to my face with sweat, barely able to breathe, they all resumed their assigned duties and secretly passed around the dollar bills to pay off their bets while the rest of my cousins shouted, "Kiddie cocktails please, kiddie cocktails please," and I tried to figure out how in the hell I was going to get out of our next family gathering.

While that whole betting scenario is probably just a figment of my imagination, my family is twisted. Even if it didn’t happen that way, there isn’t one of them reading this right now that isn’t snapping their fingers and saying, “Damn, why didn’t WE think of that.”